To monitor the wheels of a vehicle it is desirable not only to be able to make assertions concerning the state of the wheels overall, but also assertions concerning each wheel, in particular. For example, it is desirable to be able to inform the driver not only that the pressure of a tire is too high or too low, but for which wheel this is the case. For this purpose it is necessary to know the corresponding wheel positions of the wheels on the vehicle (for example, front left tire). Since wheels of vehicles are regularly removed, such wheel position determination is necessary after each new mounting of a wheel. The approaches to carry out this automatically without involvement of the driver are known.
For example, it is known from DE 196 08 478 A1 to equip each wheel with a transmitter that transmits radio signals to a control. Based on the signal intensity received by the control, a conclusion can be drawn concerning the distance between the control and the corresponding transmitter and therefore the wheel position of the corresponding wheel. A drawback is that receiving devices assigned to individual wheels are used, which make this approach demanding and expensive.
It is known from DE 103 16 074 A1 to determine the wheel positions of wheels of a vehicle on the basis of information indicating the steering angle for steerable or steered wheels and the slope angle (camber) for all wheels. For this person motion sensors are used to record the corresponding steering angle and slope sensors to record the slope angle. Here again the number of required sensors represents a drawback. In addition, wheel position determination occurs here by conducting two methods in succession.
The task of the present invention is to determine the wheel position of a wheel on a vehicle in a simpler and faster manner, especially to reduce the number of components and process steps used for this purpose.